Microsoft Century/Asia typography

[stephend]

Could someone explain why Microsoft's Century Font has been adjusted for use in Asian typography? The adjustment means that certain characters like the colon and semi colon are set too high. I'd like to persuade some people I work with to stop using it and switch to Century Schoolbook. I found this note but little else.

Thanks very much!

 

 

[Ralf Herrmann]

I’m not sure what kind of answer you hope for. It’s adjusted for Asias typography to work better for Asia typography, which I presume means things like top-to-bottom typesetting and mixed scripts. Microsoft has a global market and it’s legitimate to ship fonts targeted to specific areas. There are in fact many system fonts which are not optimized for Latin left-to-right typesetting, even though there is a Latin character set. In those cases, the solution is to not use the font this way. Not much more to tell. In the case of Century, there are plenty of versions available, which will work fine for English and other Latin scripts. 

[Riccardo Sartori]

1 hour ago, stephend said:

I'd like to persuade some people I work with to stop using it and switch to Century Schoolbook.

By all means do it. The versions bundled with Microsoft products are, in fact, the same typeface. The only difference, as explained in the link you provided, being that Century is optimised for Asian typography.

If you need some additional reasons, you can point out that Century Schoolbook also offers proper Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic styles, while Century has only Regular, thus the other styles would be faked by the software.